Revue Française De Psychanalyse. XXXVIII, 1974: Novel-Psychoanalysis. Catherine B. Clément and Bernard Pingaud. Pp. 5-24.

Bernard Pingaud, author of the novel, La voix de son maître (His Master's Voice), and Catherine B. Clément discuss the problem of the analytic novel. Their purpose is to determine whether there is such a genre and what its characteristics might be. They consider the claim that psychoanalytic writing is replacing the classical novel, even though analysts may not as yet be aware of their functioning as writers. The analyst utilizes the experiences of others, while the novelist utilizes his own experience, but the unconscious speaks in both instances. The unconscious fantasies of patients, which are unavailable to the patients by themselves, become evident as the analyst listens and writes about them in his case reports. Perhaps it is the psychoanalyst now, rather than the novelist, who sounds out the depths of the human heart. In an essay heavily influenced by structuralist themes, Clément emphasizes that the analyst has now assumed a function which was in times past delegated to other practitioners, such as the shaman, the sorcerer and the madman. Pingaud stresses the parallel development of the novel and psychoanalysis in cultural history, suggesting that analysis would not have been possible in a society which had not developed the novel with its own particular view of psychological reality.